Summary:
I have had this book in my possession for years. I think I’ve probably owned it since I was ten years old. I have always enjoyed reading this book. It is technically a children’s book, but it has some very adult themes. I actually read a few other reviews on this book and one parent was particularly upset because things like teen pregnancy were mentioned. I’m going to do the summary, then we’re going to talk about the more adult themes in this book.
Ginny is six years old when her father is shot. He doesn’t make it. One man robs two girls of their father and a wife of her husband. Ginny, her sister, Junie, and their mother, live in a coal mining town. A coal mining town works a lot like a mill town. The houses are provided and you get credit at the company store as long as you work at the mine. The mine owner tells Ginny’s mom that they have to move. He isn’t a terrible man, he just has a business to run.
Ginny and her family move up to a little place called Sweet Creek Holler. It’s not entirely different, but it’s different enough to Ginny and her sister Junie. They make friends right away though. A good friend the girls make is an older girl named Lou Jean. Lou Jean has a drunk for a father and a witch for a mother. The mother isn’t a literal witch, but she is pretty mean. The coal mine owner also lives in Sweet Creek Holler with his widowed mother.
Ginny goes to school. She makes friends. She learns a lot about death and poverty from a young age. Her grandfather makes promises he hardly ever keeps. Her mother provides for the family through social security only. Ginny learns the trials of being poor and not so pretty.
She grows up along the way.
One rumor that floats around the holler is the tale of how Josh Clancy’s sisters died. Josh Clancy is the coal mine owner. The rumor is that Josh’s father went crazy and shot Josh’s younger sisters then shot himself. From the beginning Ginny and Junie can see the ghosts of two girls up at the big house in the holler.
Ginny gets into more adventures while living in Sweet Creek Holler. She almost gets bitten by a Copperhead snake. The situation of how she is rescued leads to much tongue wagging, particularly by the holler gossip, Mrs. Moore. Ginny writes plays. She plays with her dog buddy. She moons over a boy who doesn’t like her back. Along the way her friend Lou Jean grows up. At one point her own mother tries to trade her to an encyclopedia salesmen for a set of encyclopedias.
Ginny learns a lot at a very young age about the harshness of real life. Even at the beginning of the story we find out that Ginny hears her mother crying in the night on Christmas eve because she doesn’t have anything to give her daughters for Christmas.
What I liked: This story is well written. There is dialect thrown in, but it serves to further the story. It make sense being there.
This story is rough, but it really is beautiful. I really felt like Ruth was able to capture the life of a coal mining town and a rural Appalachian holler in the early 1900s. Although, I have never heard the term ‘Hidy’ in place of hello. Maybe it’s a form of howdy?
Ruth’s description of Sweet Creek Holler reminds me of district twelve in The Hunger Games movie. District twelve was actually an old mill town, but the town was amazingly transformed into a coal mining town. When I first saw The Hunger Games, district twelve reminded me of descriptions I had read in this book and others like it. Mining towns were sold as this ideal. It’s kind of how people outside the military see the military. You have a job. You have a place to live. You have healthcare. It’s all seen as good, but they don’t see the inside.
This reminds me of a demonstration someone gave one time when I was taking a class. There were two mugs. One was dirty on the outside and one was clean on the outside. We had to pick which one to drink out of only seeing the outside. We couldn’t look at the inside. Of course we picked the one that was clean on the outside. It turned out that the mug with the clean outside was really filthy on the inside. The lesson here is that you don’t know everything that is going on just from looking at the outside of something. That was how coal mining towns were. They weren’t this blissful Utopia where people walked on rainbows and ate ice cream every day. In many instances people ended up in terrible, terrible, debt to the coal mining company for their food and healthcare. Poverty was a rule. Poverty was the rule in rural Appalachia for a long time, in fact, poverty is still a rule in rural Appalachia.
Recently, I took a small vacation with my husband. We took a drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s beautiful, but we also got to see some of the countryside. Those areas are still some very poor areas.
I think my whole praise of Ruth is that she was able to capture this poverty in her book.
Another instance in which I would like to praise this book is the very thing that other people might hate about it. This book deals with depression, death, poverty, murder, pedophilia, rumor mongering, alcoholism, and teen pregnancy. These things are all in this book to a degree. It’s all there. You might be thinking, “Oh this is absolutely terrible that this “children’s” book has all of these terrible things.” Well…get over it.
First of all, I don’t truly consider this a children’s book. Second of all, these are all things we deal with all the time. If you’re trying to hide death and poverty from your kids, you’re not going to succeed. Your kids grow up faster than you realize. It’s a disservice to children to try to hide the bad things of the world from them. It is true that a bit of sheltering isn’t going to hurt at all. It’s not a good idea to drive your kids past a known brothel on the way home from school every day. It’s also not a good idea to tell your kids that someone who is dead is only sleeping or something equally as saccharine and damaging.
This book is fiction, but it’s realistic. The world is not gum drops and lollipops. Bad things happen. People commit suicide. People get depressed. Teenagers get pregnant. Sometimes other kids are abused by their parents. Ruth fits all these things in this book, but it’s not grim. It’s not terrible. It’s actually a really good story. In the end we feel like Ginny, our main character, is going to be ok. She’s going to be fine. She’s had to toughen up because of the things she’s had in her life, but she’s going to be just fine. I really like that about this book.
What I didn’t like: With all of this said, I do feel like Ginny really gets the rough end of a bargain. Her family is dirt poor. She has lost her father at a very young age. She knows more about murder and suicide than a kid her age should know. She sees depression. She sees abuse. She sees broken promises. It’s a lot to take in. I feel bad that so many of these things happen to Ginny.
Lou Jean’s story is just about the saddest thing in the world. I don’t like what ends up happening to her.
Overall, this is a very good book. It’s a good book if you’re a teenager and it’s a good book if you’re an adult. It’s read just the same for either. I don’t think this is a book for ten-year old kids. Don’t buy this book for your ten-year old and then whine about how many terrible things are in it afterward. This book has a great story. The story is wonderful, but seriously, it’s not for ten-year old kids.
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One-Eleven Books2 